Tuesday, November 15, 2005

No business IT operation rushes into any upgrade and the advice Gartner gives is basically to follow good policy with regard to adopting Microsoft's next OS, Vista.

Even so, the warning is unusually weak on endorsing Vista and reads more like the veiled warnings the hero in a bad detective story gets from some hard case. Really. Gartner points out that most of the features, such as desktop search and an improved firewall are already available from either MS or third parties for XP. They 'pooh, pooh' the enhanced security of IE 7 by depicting it as purely a reaction to defections to Mozilla Firefox by some users.

More and more, Vista is getting "dead-panned" by those who might influence potential adopters. And there are increasing numbers of hints from journalists that Vista might be pushed back even further. I suspect Microsoft has no one to blame for this but themselves. Even so; it looks as if Vista may debut to only a lukewarm reception by a press and analyst community who have already pronounced it to be nearly irrelevant. No matter the reality of Vista, I'm sure it deserves better than that.